Poland’s Walesa ‘Collaborated With Communist Regime’

Walesa, who was the co-founder of the Solidarity movement, which brought down the communist regime in Poland, says he is willing to defend himself in court against the allegations. The head of Poland’s National Remem…

Walesa was first a soldier, and then a shipyard worker until the mid 1970s. The head of Poland’s National Remembr…

Walesa denied the accusations.

It is not yet clear how damaging the revelations will be to Walesa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 for his defiant opposition to the communists and who became Poland’s first democratically-elected president after the 1989 fall of communism.

The former president was cleared of security service collaboration by a special court in 2000.

The controversy re-emerged in 2008 with the publication of a biography, The Security Services and Lech Walesa, by two historians from the Institute of National Remembrance, Slawomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk.

Mr Walesa, 72, speaking from Venezuela where he is travelling, suggested the papers are fake. “I will prove that in court”, he said.

Communism and Moscow’s control were imposed on Poland and other eastern European countries after the Second World War.

Soviet authorities commonly used false information to discredit activists while secret services used personal information to blackmail targets and keep dissidents under control.

The IPN said it had on Tuesday acquired a handwritten piece of paper from 1974 recounting a conversation between a Polish secret police (SB) official and secret agent “Bolek”.

The organization says it accessed documents, which have been confirmed as genuine, from the home of the widow of General Czeslaw Kiszczak, who was also communist Poland’s last prime minister.

Apparently dating from the 1970s, the documents also contain payment receipts signed by “Bolek”, Kaminski said.

The 279 pages of documents seem to be authentic and will be made public in due course, Kaminski told a news conference.

He added that he was surprised by the emotions the affair has raised again because “really Lech Walesa has never hidden that he had some contacts and problems [with the secret police] in the 70s”. “He is the symbol of Solidarity and nothing can destroy that, unless we learn that he continued that collaboration”, Dudek said.

“There can exist no documents coming from me”. She demanded 90,000 zlotys ($23,000; 20,000 euros).

According to Kaminski, five more packets of seized documents have not yet been opened. Prosecutors and police were also searching Mr Kiszczak’s summer house.

He founded and led the Solidarity trade union from 1980, and was Poland’s president from 1990 to 1995.